Imagine this:
You’re lying in your crib. It’s dark, but you’re warm and dry and
comfortable. Anyway, it’s always dark. There’s an absolute cacophony of
noise around you. Cars, and barking dogs, and illegible murmuring from
somewhere higher than your head, Mommy making the same murmurs, Daddy
murmuring back. There’s a constant ticking, and a low hum that’s
beginning and end is always preceded by a beep. There are unidentifiable
scents coming from the kitchen and then a whistle. You like that
whistle. It’s almost always followed by a snuggle as you get picked up
and fussed over. Your anticipation grows with the swipe of a soft
horizontal stroke on your cheek by Mommy’s finger and then (Saints be
praised) your beloved bottle is in your mouth. You gently cascade into
formula induced euphoria while feeling and hearing a quietly sung song.
That was what I presumed was going on for Gabriel on the evening of
December 23th 2007. Exactly six months old, he was experimenting with
baby cereal, rolling over with wild abandon and his soft spot was
sculling over to the point that I could almost bring myself to touch it.
He and I had spent the day listening to Nat King Cole and taking
Christmas pictures. Well, I was taking pictures and he was daydreaming
of gumming my camera, no doubt.
Gabriel said his first word, “Dada” (Benedict Baby) about a week
earlier, but apparently shocked himself so deeply with his ability to
speak intelligibly, that he decided to revert back to coos and giggles
for a while. I, on the other hand, was swearing more than usual and
covered in bruises from the knees down. I’d taken to doing almost
everything with my eyes closed and it was not going well. Not at all. I
was realizing, quite painfully, exactly how much I depended on a sense
that I’d previously taken completely for granted. Luckily, I refuse to
cook the week before Christmas Eve, or else there might have been a need
for me to learn to type with my toes.
My days in the dark taught me many things. 1) I suck at being blind.
2) Things you can’t see are hard to understand even if you know what
they are. 3) Coffee tables come alive and move two inches to the right
when no one is looking. I have no concrete proof of this, but I’m
convinced it’s true. 4) My experiment was as useless as a Mechanized Egg
Cracker. I was trying to bluff being blind, but Gabriel was never going
to be a sightaholic like his Mother. It would be a huge issue in his
life, but – for the most part, only as debilitating as he let it be.
What does any of this have to do with talking? Not much, I just enjoy telling that story.
The talking thing is pretty self explanatory. When your kid can’t
see, you have to tell then everything. Every. Single. Thing. In the
beginning, it was easy. Gabriel’s world was very small, and routine.
Then things got bigger, I got a car. We’d go out, he’d be chilaxing in
his carrier and I’d be prattling on:
“I’m putting your carrier down in the shopping cart. Shopping carts
are made of metal. The metal is cold because the store has air
conditioning – that’s the humming sound you hear in the back ground.
There is a lady standing next to us. She has black hair, brown eyes and
is very tan. She’s wearing blue jeans and a white tank top. She’s
looking at me like I’m a crazy person and casually reaching for her cell
phone. Let’s go over by the fruit now. I’m rolling us outta here….do
you hear the squeaky wheel on the shopping cart?”
You get the point. That was when he was 6 months old. I never dumbed
down my vocabulary and rarely baby talked to him. He had other relatives
to Coochie-Coo him, I had to be his sense of sight and your sense of
sight is never supposed to sound ridiculous. Initially, I was a fount of
information that was way over his head, but he caught up and he caught
up fast. At the time, I thought I was just trying to teach him, but now
I realize that I was trying to paint the world for him with words.
Once he started speaking, things got really fun. His interest and
interaction made it easy. Babies spend most of their time looking at
the world around them but my kid couldn’t. Gabriel was missing 20% of
his sensory stimulation. I kept his other senses busy, so he wouldn’t
get bored. I started seeking out places to take him, where they had
cool stuff we could ‘check out’ and talk about. I was reading to him
every night, using different voices for different characters and made
YouTube playlists of the same Disney song – repeated, in as many
languages as I could find. I don’t speak a word of Polish but about 3
years ago I could sing ‘Prince Ali, Ali Ababwa’ as if I was born in
Krakow.
Not everyone is as verbal as I am, and that’s fine. Just talk. Tell
your little one everything that’s going on, give lots of details. Get
books that overly describe things (I recommend anything by Anne Rice)
and read often to your child. Don’t be afraid to use terrible Russian
accents and a creaky falsetto for every wicked witch – that will help
them realize that different people are speaking.
Talking toys are wonderful, but play with it for a little while, so
you can be sure that it doesn’t make you feel in anyway homicidal,
before you commit to buying said toy. Even though your baby can’t see
you attacking Mr. Insanely Irritating Voiced Frog with a hammer, they
will sense that something very, very bad is happening.
When you have tired of the sound of your own voice, and you will,
make playlists on YouTube of other people talking – language videos are
always good, just prescreen the videos, there is some horrifyingly
bizarre stuff on YouTube. Give your child a good basis in language and a
sense of the world at the same time.
You might also want to start thinking about how to describe some of
the trickier things out there. Like Soap Bubbles. No, seriously. Think
about it and get back to me. I need an answer by Friday.
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